Posts filed under 'Samuel’s Dreams'
Yesterday afternoon while I was having a nap, I had an interesting dream. The dream took place a few weeks after I had inherited a sum of money and a printing press, and started with me preparing the first edition of “Capital Region Daily Truth”, a newspaper for Canberra and surrounds.
I had hired some journalists to work on the ground in Canberra and some of the surrounding towns, and was looking over the reports I had received from my federal parliamentary reporters for the “House On The Hill” section which took a different approach to reporting on federal politics…they actually reported in detail on what happened in the House and the Senate, rather than just on the press conferences. Looking over these reports reminded me of a few points which I wanted to include in my first edition’s editorial about reporting on the truth of things which have happened rather than on spurious speculation and hearsay.
I had two editorials for the first edition of the paper. One, on the front page, was the one I mentioned a moment ago, and outlined the purpose and mission of the paper, while the other editorial in the paper’s opinion section outlined the paper’s editorial line which would focus on liberty, freedom, and the importance of fiscal conservatism in government.
The first edition of the paper sold reasonably well. It sold more copies outside of Canberra than within Canberra, which I put down to the quality of the reporting on matters which affected areas surrounding Canberra, and Canberra’s habit of being a bit of a left-leaning town which was likely to be sceptical of my “conservative” paper.
Each location had its own page which the reporter(s) were under orders to fill every day, with incentives to fill more space, which is exactly what my Cooma reporter did on the paper’s second day.
The reporter got his hands on an internal plan from Cooma-Monaro Shire Council to install a gigantic loudspeaker on the Council’s roof which would produce a series of tones every hour, allegedly to improve the ability of the soil within the shire to grow grass which had higher-than-normal nutritional value for sheep. The loudspeaker would be loud enough to be heard 200 kilometres away in Goulburn during a southerly wind. The Council’s internal plan noted that the loudspeaker would be approved “by administrative means” so as to avoid the need for it to go in front of a public council meeting, as there was a fear that the public might disapprove if they were allowed to comment before the loudspeaker was built. It also cited research in to the nutritional benefits of tones at various frequencies by a researcher who we were unable to locate.
This story was the lead story for the paper, while The Canberra Times led with a story about Katy Gallagher winning a painting competition. The Cooma page of the paper had other Cooma-based stories filling it, with a pointer to the front page for the loudspeaker story.
As the week went on, we found out that the researcher responsible for this tone idea was flying in to the country to configure the loudspeaker, and had recently changed his name after being disgraced in the University of East Anglia’s dodgy climate change data controversy. Under intense questioning from myself and the Cooma reporter at Canberra Airport, this researcher admitted to his role in doctoring the climate change data, admitted that the planet has not warmed for 16 years and that the evidence supporting man-made global warming has been completely refuted and the data was doctored so that the government grant money would keep rolling in, and that he had completely made up the benefits of tones on the growth of crops in the knowledge that some local government somewhere would fall for it and pay him lots of money to set it up.
As a result of this and other stories which Capital Region Daily Truth published that week, it was outselling The Canberra Times 10:1 by the end of the week, and through the editorial effort to educate on the importance of fiscal conservatism in government, helped to cause Canberra to elect conservative politicians to both Senate and both House of Representatives seats at the federal election, which actually occurred a week later than the announced date of September 14 due to a typo on the writs.
Incidentally, Katy Gallagher’s award-winning painting was very nice. It was a colourful abstract painting based on the idea of Floriade’s flowers being planted on top of a gigantic concrete flower on City Hill, an idea which was later approved, just at Williamsdale instead of the solar power station, not on City Hill.
Samuel
February 13th, 2013 at 04:14pm
I had what can only be described as a very peculiar dream this afternoon (yes, this afternoon…the joys of being a shift worker). It started with me seeing an ad in a floating newspaper for a new venture from Thrifty Car Rentals who had decided to buy a bunch of Cessnas and lend them to people.
For whatever reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to fly to Bundanoon (about half way between Canberra and Sydney), so knowing that I don’t have the appropriate qualifications to fly a Cessna, I took out a label maker and covered the word “Driver’s” on my driver’s licence with the word “Pilot’s”.
I then walked out to Canberra Airport rather than driving as for some reason it seemed logical that if I had changed the purpose of my licence, then I would not be able to drive. When I got to the airport I was more than a tad surprised to find that the people at Thrifty quite gladly accepted that my licence with a sticky label on it was perfectly valid, handed me the keys to an aeroplane and off I went. Even more strangely, the aeroplane had an AM/FM radio so I tuned in to the Olympics (which is odd considering that in my dream it was 10am and the Olympics would not have been on at that time of day) and heard Mark Levy getting ready to commentate on the singing competition which Gordon Bray was competing in.
I took off…in reverse, but eventually figured out how to fly forwards, which made the air traffic control tower people happy, and started to make my way to Bundanoon. As I took off, Gordon Bray started singing Love Potion Number Nine which he was caught singing the other day, and with the Cessna on autopilot I sent Mark Levy an email advising that I thought Gordon deserved a gold medal, which he promptly read, although he disagreed as he saw that Ray Hadley was joining the competition and thought that Ray would be tough competition for Gordon.
Unfortunately I didn’t hear Ray sing as once I passed Goulburn, the radio stopped working and I had to insert eleven coins so that the engine would keep working. I then landed on the roof of a barn in Bundanoon and had a nap, at which point the dream ended.
As I say, most peculiar.
Samuel
August 8th, 2012 at 10:19pm
This afternoon (yes, I do sometimes sleep in the afternoon when I’m on night shift) I had a dream that I was a regular guest on a TV show. It was my role to opine on the news of the day, and it looked like the TV show was a breakfast show, although it wasn’t one of the breakfast shows which is currently in existence. Instead it was a show titled “Talking” and had a set which looked like it was built out of concrete in Soviet Russia (hmmm, Maritz will read this…I wonder what she thinks of concrete buildings?), with a few small square bits of coloured paper stuck to the wall to make it look less bland…not that it helped.
Anyway, I walked on to the set one day for my segment, took my seat and was approached by a producer who quickly whisked me away in to an office to inform me that I was not going to appear that day, and would instead need to wait around until the end of the show so that I could pre-record a month’s worth of segments. According to the producer, I was “very difficult and troublesome to work with” because I wanted a cup of coffee each day instead of the company’s usual glass of water. According to the producer, coffee was “hard to come by” and “goes off very quickly once opened” and it was therefore not feasible to buy a new jar of coffee every few days when I was the only person drinking it. Instead, what they were going to do was buy a jar of coffee once per month and make me one cup of coffee per segment so that the jar would be emptied, the coffee would not be going to waste, and they would only need to buy one jar per month instead of four.
I told the producer that this was insanity, and that it would be impossible to pre-record opinion pieces on the news of the day a month before the news had happened, to which the producer replied “but, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it? I mean, that way you don’t have to worry about being late with a story because you can be ahead of it.”
I stared at the producer blankly before bursting out laughing, but the producer didn’t get it. I asked him how he expected me to know what would happen in advance, and he informed me that it was simple.
“News is all on the teleprompter, so if we just scroll forward then you can read it and then record your opinion segment” he said.
I told him that he was nuts, and as his decision had the full backing of the network executives, I enacted the severance clause in my contract which entitled me to one free tin of coffee and three coloured squares from the studio wall, and I left.
My segment was replaced that day by Blinky The Fortune-Telling Clown who, after a month on-air, had a zero percent accuracy rating. Oddly, the ratings for the show went up, and he was awarded with two segments per day. The network even launched an advertising campaign for it: “Just as much Talking, with double in inaccuracy”.
The dream ended when I saw the ad for that in the newspaper.
Samuel
April 3rd, 2012 at 07:22pm
Yesterday I had a dream that I was at work and was going about my business, walking along a corridor which looked surprisingly like the back corridors of the CIT campus in Reid. While I was walking I was handed some papers by one of my supervisors at work, and he advised me that the papers needed to be delivered to rooms 2 & 3 immediately. The papers appeared to be some of the usual correspondence that I receive at work on a daily basis.
I changed direction to head to rooms 2 & 3, but accidentally dropped one of the papers and it fell through a grate in the floor, down to the basement. I hurried down to the basement (which looked like the basement of my primary school) and saw that the paper had landed on some equipment, caught fire, and was levitating. I picked up a fire extinguisher and aimed it at the floating and burning paper, but it did not put the fire out, instead it blew it over towards a petrol tank which quickly became engulfed in flames, and exploded.
The explosion wiped out the entire suburb, however despite the speed at which this occurred, I was able to escape the area along with everybody else. We probably broke the land speed record.
I was approached by a fire investigator who asked me how the fire started. Feeling guilty, I tried to deny any involvement, however he marched me off to court where, upon meeting the judge, agreed to admit to starting the fire. The judge announced that he would sentence me to thirty years in prison, and that ten years of that sentence was a direct result of me lying to the fire investigator as the sentence he normally hands down for wiping out suburbs in explosions is twenty years per suburb (suburban destruction must be more common than I thought).
Samuel
April 3rd, 2012 at 04:20pm
This dream took place in St. George Bank’s civic branch and started off over at a counter on the row of counters directly opposite the front door of the branch. I was standing at the 2nd counter from the left edge and corner of the counters.
For some reason I was having multiple bank cards weighed. The teller kept weighing the various cards (I counted five of them), writing notes about each one and seemed to be quite concerned. They “hmmmm”ed over a few cards for a while before bringing a few other tellers over who had much the same reaction. Eventually the teller brought three of the cards back to me and announced “it should be fixed now, the 11th vertex of the obligation was not fulfilled in an expected manner so we have removed the 12th and added an extra 10th, and we can add Candex Proton if it happens again”.
I thanked the teller, took my cards and then sat down where I was on the customer side of the counter, where a computer terminal popped up facing me and I started doing my day job, despite the fact that I was not at work. A person was also working two counters to my right.
A few moments later a rather loud and obnoxious woman who was noticeably overweight walked in and proclaimed rather loudly that she was from a charity and therefore her bags of coins should be weighed first as she had to take the money back to the store. She was also flailing her arms about quite a lot, making an awful racket with the three small bags of coins which she was carrying.
The noise was making it quite difficult to work, and was annoying me, the other person who was working and all of the bank staff who were busy fixing vertices on other bank cards. The woman kept getting louder and louder until eventually the manager came over with some scales and weighed the woman. Happy Dragon then came out from his office with a “vertex-adjusted bank card” and a few ten dollar notes, which he gave to her in exchange for the coins. Happy Dragon then took the coins back to his office, while the woman sat down with the manager in the middle of the bank and ate her lunch, and the dream ended.
Samuel
February 8th, 2011 at 02:02am
Last night (or perhaps yesterday afternoon, given the time of day that my sleep started) I had an odd dream about my upcoming visit to the optometrist which I mentioned the other day.
In the dream I was walking through the alarm clock department of David Jones in the Canberra Centre in Civic which was a fairly large section with many shelves of alarm clocks and golden down-lighting, when I realised that it was 5:15pm and that I had to go to the optometrist, so I went to the building and entered through the side door, when it occurred to me that I had forgotten to retrieve cash from an ATM for my appointment.
I then rapidly scurried back to the Canberra Centre which had morphed in to Westfield Chatswood and found “The ATM Shop” where a very large and cranky ATM ate my ATM card and started berating me like the blackboard in Mr. Squiggle. The cranky ATM eventually agreed to dispense some money as long as I would listen to him singing. The ATM then started singing, and the dream ended.
As long as my visit to the optometrist on Tuesday isn’t as bizarre as that, I’ll be happy.
Samuel
January 15th, 2011 at 02:45am
Before I went to sleep this afternoon, I was watching some of the Melbourne Cup preview and history of the Melbourne Cup on TV. I was also thinking about the impending mid-term elections in the US. I suspect that the two combined and morphed in to this unusual dream.
The dream started at one of the bus bays of the old Belconnen Interchange where Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd from Fox News Radio KDOX in Las Vegas were standing. Casey had binoculars and Heather had an umbrella which seemed to double as a hat. There were lots of other people in the area and they all seemed to be facing the open-air carpark side of the bus interchange which, rather than being a carpark, was quite hilly and had sections covered in grass, and other sections covered in concrete.
Suddenly a loud voice started counting down on the loudspeakers, and when it hit zero, the dream changed to some cheap looking purple set with a table and a flower in a corner, and Channel Nine’s Tracy Grimshaw standing there informing us that “it’s now time to cross to the race with local A Current Affair hosts Casey and Heather”. The implication of the dream was that, unlike reality, in the dream Nine’s local affiliate’s had their own local editions of A Current Affair which pre-empted Tracy’s national version.
The dream then changed to a 4:3 aspect ratio and crossed back to Casey and Heather who were very excited about the race, although there was a pause every time they tried to mention the small Australian town which they were broadcasting from. A Countrylink train station style sign with the town name appeared in the background of some shots, but was not in focus and was not readable.
The race started, and Casey called the race as the horses ran along the hilly concrete and grass track behind the fence where the open-air carpark would be in real life. The Nine watermark appeared, but seemed to carry tennis scores with it, so disappeared shortly after it appeared.
Eventually the race ended. Casey and Heather were both very excited about the result…hardly a surprise given that a horse called Tim Tam won the race.
They crossed back to Tracy Grimshaw who thanked them both, announced that the station would take an ad break while she visited the TAB to collect her winnings, and the dream then ended with a slow motion replay of Casey and Heather getting excited at the end of the race.
If this dream means anything, I’m hoping that it means Casey and Heather will be excited by the result of the mid-term elections. We’ll find out on the day I suppose.
Samuel
October 31st, 2010 at 09:55pm
Last night while I was sleeping I had the radio on as I often do, and 2UE’s John Kerr was on. This seemed to prompt a dream.
In the dream I was sitting on the floor with my laptop, while the radio was sitting on the top of a tall cabinet and I was looking up at it. John Kerr was on the radio so I sent him an email which read:
Dear John,
The relatives are bad. Parliament is sitting.
Regards,
Samuel
And just after I sent the email, John went to read it. He got as far as “The relatives are bad” when he stopped and noted that this seemed like a very mean thing to write. He then read the rest of the email, which he said made no sense, so I decided to call him to clarify the email.
I explained to John that the email was about cheese and various methods of producing cheese, and that I had accidentally left out a few words. John said that he could now see what I was trying to write in the email, talked about a time when he made cheese, and went on to invite people to call in about making cheese.
The dream then ended, however I did wake up this morning slightly confused as to whether this had actually happened. A quick check of my emails confirmed that it had, thankfully, been a dream.
Samuel
October 31st, 2010 at 02:29pm
This dream took place at the Woden Bus Interchange. I was walking towards the shopping centre when silence replaced the noise of bus engines. All of the buses had stalled, and none of them would start again. One of the bus drivers got out of the bus and started yelling “we need a tractor, does anybody have a tractor?”.
Sure enough, a nearby newsagent just happened to keep a tractor in his cupboard in case of such a situation, and drove it over to the first bus where he unsuccessfully tried to jump start the bus. I decided to go and have a cup of coffee as there was no point in standing around waiting for a bus in the rain.
I went upstairs to Cafe Copenhagen and sat down. The older lady was the only staff member there, and she sort of hovered over with my coffee and started talking about cake before hovering away. I started to drink my coffee and then my phone rang…it was a call from “Cal”.
I immediately knew that this call was from Callum Smith, a person I went to primary school with and met once during high school at an inter-school sporting event, although how I knew it was him, I have no idea. I answered the phone, only to be told that “the problem is a lack of carrots…feed Boris carrots” which I understood to mean that the tractor’s name was Boris, and if I fed carrots to Boris, he would be able to jump start the buses.
I thanked Callum for the information and informed him of who I am, which surprised him as he had started calling numbers at random when he heard about the buses. I then finished my coffee and went in search of carrots, at which point the dream ended.
This did make me wonder if there was something in the coffee I had been drinking before I went to bed. Thankfully though, none of it came true when I visited Woden the next day.
Samuel
October 13th, 2009 at 08:56am
Yesterday morning a little while after 11am I went to bed (yes, my sleep pattern is nuts) and had the radio on (and yes, it was the radio as I had a car FM transmitter hooked up to my laptop so that I and the rest of the house could listen to KXNT). Heather Kydd was discussing a story in Las Vegas involving drink-driving, and I think it prompted the peculiar dream I had yesterday afternoon.
The dream started with me driving south on Coulter Drive heading towards the Redfern Street roundabout (the location makes sense as I was pulled over just north of this point once). I was planning on going straight through the roundabout, but just before I exited the roundabout I noticed a police car coming at me on my side of the road for no apparent reason, they did not have their lights flashing or anything like that. I swerved to avoid them, and ended up with my car half up on the grass to the left of Coulter Drive south of the roundabout. I stopped the car figuring that the police might double back to check what was almost an accident, and I then looked out the window and saw a police car drive straight past in a southerly direction, so I figured that I was in the clear and went to take off…then the police car which had run me off the road came up behind me and flashed their lights at me, so I stopped again.
The police asked me to get out of my car and submit to a breath test, which I did, albeit whilst informing them that I was annoyed by them running me off the road. A few moments went by before the result of the breath test came back…I blew 0.342. I protested the result on the grounds that “I haven’t been drinking, and if you knew me, you’d know that I wouldn’t be able to stand at about a third of that” and then agreed to go with the police to the police station for a formal blood alcohol level check…as long as we could go by my house first to lock the doors. Strangely, the police agreed.
We went back to my house and the police locked the windows while I locked the doors, then there was a loud bang and Nattie started barking. A meteor had landed in my backyard…the police saw this and breath tested the meteor. It blew zero, and the police then informed me that I was free to go as the breathalysers report readings of 0.342 in the half-hour before meteors crash in Canberra.
Another meteor then crashed in to my kitchen, causing my microwave to explode…at which point the dream ended.
Samuel
October 4th, 2009 at 06:57am
You’ve probably heard the ongoing series of ads from Commerical Radio Australia, starring Mark Mitchell as the numbling interviewer who is trying to convince you to advertise or keep advertising on radio. It’s a good campaign and it seems to have worked quite well for them, and as such, if they take the idea from my dream for their next campaign, they’re completely nuts.
The dream started with me being in a studio in a cupboard opening a package…when I opened the package a CD started making noise (without a CD player). The opening monologue from Neil Mitchell (yes, Neil…somebody in dream casting stuffed up and got the wrong Mitchell) told me all about how radio is the perfect medium to let the world know when you lose or find something. This was followed by three callers rambling about how they lost a cat, a tin of sardines and a fruit shop respectively while the Big Brother theme music played in the background. Neil Mitchell then came back on with “Commercial Radio, you lose it, we find it”.
At this point, the dream ended.
With dreams like this, is it any wonder that I have trouble sleeping?
Samuel
September 23rd, 2009 at 02:43pm
Well, a photo of him…and it was a dream, I don’t know if Larry has ever actually been on Fox News.
For some reason I had a dream last night where I was browsing the Fox News website and noticed on the right hand side of their page where they promote some of their shows, they were promoting “the gameshow hour”, with a picture of Larry Emdur and a model standing on either side of the yellow contestant bidding platform on the 1993-1998 Australian “The Price Is Right” set. The camera was placed overhead and they were looking up at it, smiling.
The website indicated that Fox News were going to become a free-to-air channel in Australia, supported by advertising and containing some Australian shows, and they were going to celebrate by running an hour of Aussie gameshow repeats, The Price Is Right and Wheel Of Fortune each day at 5pm in local Australian timezones.
I clicked the picture of Larry Emdur, and ended up on an advertising website, featuring an infomercial from Larry’s current Channel Seven show, The Morning Show. It was selling insurance.
The dream ended here before I bought insurance.
Samuel
August 21st, 2009 at 11:05am
One of my peculiar dreams…
This dream takes place at about 4am. I was walking east on Batman Street in Braddon approaching the intersection with Gooreen Street when I heard a large amount of yelling from down the road near Gorman House. I turned around to take a look and saw a lot of police cars arriving at the scene…one of the police officers pointed a magnifying glass in my direction, and I decided to leave the area.
Sure enough, a police car zoomed up the street and I was stopped by the police who wanted to know why I was walking in the area and why I had tried to leave the area when they spotted me. I informed them that I was merely out for a walk, which is not an uncommon thing for me to do at 4am, and that I had decided to leave because I was getting cold. They did not like the answer, and yelled “you were there, therefore you did it, and you watch The Bill so you know your rights, and you’re coming with us”.
I was taken back to a place which was supposedly the Civic Police Station but looked more like Sun Hill Police Station, I was then yelled at by Kenny Koala and then (in my mind proving that this was actually Sun Hill) Superintendent John Heaton appeared, apologised for my arrest, informed me that they had caught the person who was responsible for the crime (I still have no idea what it was) and that I would be given a plane ticket to get home, from Civic to Reid.
The dream continued though, as I was unable to leave as none of the doors would unlock, prompting Supt. Heaton to turn on the TV and ring the TV shopping number to order in food while they waited for Kevin Rudd to ring the locksmith, which “usually takes a week or two as Wayne Swan likes to have the tax office audit them first”.
The dream then ended.
Samuel
August 18th, 2009 at 11:53am
I’ve been deliberately avoiding making mention of the Kyle and Jackie O fiasco over the last week for the simple reason that I think they only did it for the publicity, and I don’t want to give them the pleasure…and I even rejected Maritz’s column this week because that was her main topic, however I think I need to make an exception for the bizarre dream I had yesterday evening.
In this dream, I was a chauffeur, and Kyle Sandilands got in to the back of the car and demanded that I drive him to Honolulu where, to quote him “they don’t treat their all-knowing celebrities like this”. I informed him that I could take him to the airport, but I can’t drive to Honolulu, which annoyed him, but he begrudgingly accepted this situation, making a remark about how I “must be in on it” and that if I were a Honolululian I would “fix the car so that it can be driven on water”.
Slightly annoyed, and wishing I had a button to eject Kyle from the car, I started driving him to the airport, however a short time later a short man wearing antlers jumped in front of the car, and was struck by the car. Kyle started wailing and the police arrived within moments, declaring the antlered man dead, and congratulating me for stopping a monster. In a state of confusion I asked Kyle what was going on, he then pulled out a microphone and informed me that the short antlered man was his ego, he didn’t know the man’s first name, and no longer wanted to go to Honolulu.
The dream then ended.
It is quite disturbing how deranged and absurd a situation can become in a dream after some alcohol.
Samuel
August 4th, 2009 at 03:55am
This dream just struck me as being peculiar and odd. It, for whatever reason, takes place at the studios of KXNT is Las Vegas which, in the dream at least, consist of a series of cupboards.
The 8 o’clock traffic and weather was just about to finish, so I played the 8 o’clock flip intro and turned up Alan Stock’s microphone…but Alan just stood there in his cupboard, not saying anything, at which point I realised that I needed to take the telephone (an ancient black rotary dial phone with a speaker attached) in to Alan’s cupboard so that he could answer the calls.
I took the phone in, turned up the speaker, and Alan started taking calls…however the wires were crossed, and so all we could hear was Wayne singing. Eventually I figured out that if I hit the phone with a hammer, we could hear the callers flipping off Wayne’s singing…but there was no way to stop Wayne’s singing from getting to air.
Odd and peculiar.
Samuel
July 29th, 2009 at 02:37pm
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